From a purely technical perspective, the scene pushed the envelop considerably. Back then the programmers had to do with little more than a Turing machine, and invested time and effort into learning system specs squeezing out every drop of performance from the hardware. Imagine synching your code to the crt scanlines to get buttery smooth scrolling, or real time Mandelbrot zooming.

These days it’s less about the algorithm, and dependence on drivers and libraries to put together an art piece. I think we’ve lost something, and it isn’t just ‘evolving’.